Читать книгу Blast from the Past - Cathy Hopkins, Cathy Hopkins - Страница 14

‘Love the tree and it smells wonderful in here, of pine forests,’ I said when I arrived at Pete and Marcia’s on Christmas Day to see a Norwegian spruce, as tall as the ceiling, in the hall. It had been decorated in red and gold and piles of presents were heaped around the base, to which I added the bag-full I had brought with me.

‘Ben and Ruby did the decorations yesterday,’ said Pete as he ushered me through into the kitchen diner, which was already full of family and friends.

‘Looks fab and I can smell cinnamon and nutmeg too. Mulled wine?’

Pete nodded. ‘Just made. I’ll get you a glass. It’s all been a bit of a rush this year, though Marcia did some preparations before we went away.’

‘She ought to run the country,’ I said. Despite some of Marcia’s far-fetched ideas and predilection to be irrational at times, she was the most organized person I knew when it came to her family and work. She’d always had a gift for admin, project managing, and generally running things, though Pete often remarked it was actually just that she liked bossing people around. This season, she’d bought her Christmas cards back in October, had all the presents wrapped in November before we went away, and I’d seen her in the airport lounge in India ordering the fresh food online to be delivered on Christmas Eve. I hadn’t even bothered decorating my house because I’d missed the run-up, nor had I bothered buying any special food: there was only me at home and I didn’t plan on doing any entertaining this year.

‘Any news?’ asked Pete.

‘I have a letter waiting for me at home but have put off looking at it until after Boxing Day.’

‘It’s not like you to procrastinate.’

‘I know, but everywhere is shut over Christmas, everyone’s on holiday, so what’s the point in getting all worked up when no one’s in their office? So I’m having a bit more time off – proper time – and when everyone’s back at work, I’ll get in gear.’ Actually, part of the reason I’d been delaying the moment was that I wanted to be sure Stuart would be around to advise and, of course, he’d be busy with his wife and family over the festive period. He’d already seen me through some tough times with my business and finances, and I valued his calm approach and steadying influence.

‘I think that’s very sensible,’ said Pete as he handed me a steaming mug of mulled wine. ‘Good decision. Now get a drink and let’s put all thoughts of work, worry and changes out of our minds. Let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may diet.’

All the family were wearing their traditional jumpers: Pete’s with a pudding that lit up on the front; Marcia’s had a Santa on it, and Ruby was in a red sweater with a snowman grinning from her chest. She offered me a canapé of gravadlax and dill on rye from a tray, and I spent the next half-hour catching up with everyone who was there – Pete’s parents, down from Scotland; Marcia’s mum from Manchester who was busy preparing vegetables; Pete’s uncle Tom in charge of drinks; Marcia’s sister Yaz laying the table with Freya. Ben was sprawled on a sofa in the sitting room watching TV with his cousins; Pete’s younger brother Ted and his wife and twin girls waved from across the room where they were playing a game which involved one person wearing inflatable antlers’ horns while the others tossed rings onto them. Neighbours Jess and Ian Ward were settled with their glasses in the conservatory off the kitchen. No single men this time, I noted with relief. One year, they’d invited Nigel, a neighbour and bachelor, in the hope that we’d hit it off. We didn’t, though he got the idea that we did. There was a reason that he was single, and that was that he was the most boring man I’d ever met with a particular passion for lawnmowers, something I knew all about by the end of the afternoon.

‘And where’s your jumper?’ asked Marcia. They’d bought me a blue one with a penguin on it last year, which I had dutifully worn at the time then taken to a charity shop in January.

‘Ah … shrank in the wash, so sorry,’ I said. I was dressed in my usual black, a small nod to Christmas being the tiny silver holly-shaped earrings I’d had made and also sold in my shop.

‘You were never a good liar,’ said Pete. ‘Here, have these.’ He handed me a headband of antlers’ horns instead. Nobody got away with looking cool at their house on Christmas Day. I’d spent many Christmases there over the years and, though I’d offered to host at mine, there was no point really: we’d never all fit in. It was tradition now. Marcia and Pete’s every 25 December, apart from one winter when I was living with my last long-term partner, Richard Benson. He’d come along to their house for Christmas Day for the first two years we’d been together, but wasn’t happy either time. He was threatened by the ease and familiarity I felt when I was with my two oldest friends, especially Pete, who he felt he had to compete with. After weeks of complaint, on the third year, I’d given in and agreed to have Christmas at home, just the two of us.

It had been OK but hadn’t felt right. I missed the pandemonium that had become part of my life. After we’d split up five years ago, I’d made a new condition to my relationships, and that was ‘love me, love my friends.’ Trouble was, there hadn’t been anyone since to try the condition out on. I wondered where Richard was spending his Christmas this year. In fact, I’d been thinking a lot about all my past partners since India, reviewing who they were, who I was at the time, and asking myself if there was one who had got away. I hadn’t been thinking of them because I believed that I’d known any of them in a past life, but what Saranya Ji had said had got me thinking about the choices I’d made to get where I was today, and if there was anything I could learn from the past in order to go forward.

*

Richard Benson. I’d met him over ten years ago when he’d come into the shop in Hampstead, on one of the rare days when I was behind the counter and not up in my office on the floor above.

I’d heard the door open and looked up to see a tall, well-dressed man in his fifties coming in.

‘I’m looking for a gift for my niece,’ he’d said in a public school voice as he perused the counters and cabinets displaying jewellery. ‘It’s her twenty-first and I don’t want to go the usual Tiffany route, I’d like to give her something more personal.’

Hmm, a thoughtful man, I noted. ‘Any ideas so far?’ I asked.

‘Her name is Rose, maybe a chain with an “R” on it?’ he suggested as he pointed at a display of alphabet letter charms in gold and silver.

‘Oh no, they’re popular with the teenagers but maybe not for a twenty-first. Rose you say? How about something like this?’

I drew a quick sketch showing a bracelet with slim linked leaves with one charm on it, that being a single rosebud. ‘Far more subtle and unusual than an R,’ I told him. ‘Be lovely in silver. What do you think?’

He smiled. ‘Delightful. How clever of you just to draw it like that. It’s just the thing. Could you do it in time? The birthday’s in a few weeks.’

‘I’m sure we could,’ I said. I had a few contacts in the area who could make up a design for me.

He had returned to the shop to pick up the bracelet, then again a month later to tell me that the gift had been a great success and to ask if I’d like to go for dinner. I said yes.

Richard and I dated for a year before he moved in with me and I was impressed by his taste and initial generosity. With his army background, immaculate clothes and thin frame, he wasn’t my usual type, but I was ready for someone different. Richard was quite posh and I liked that about him – his impeccable manners, the way he spoke, the way he dressed in suits and shirts from Jermyn Street in Piccadilly, and wore handmade shoes. He always smelt wonderful, too, of Czech and Speake No.88 cologne. The typical English gentleman. He showed me another side of life. We ate in acclaimed restaurants in Mayfair, he got tickets to Glyndebourne, best seats at the theatre, taught me a lot about fine wines; we had weekends in France with his sister and a fabulous safari holiday to the Masai Mara in Kenya. It was a lifestyle I could get used to, I thought, and I did at first. I wasn’t used to being looked after so well and told friends that it was nice to have a father figure. Another plus had been that he didn’t come with any baggage or children. Richard’s first wife had died in her early twenties, a fact he’d grieved over and moved on from. ‘Life is for the living,’ he used to say. He didn’t drink to excess, didn’t take drugs, wasn’t moody and said what he meant. It was exhilarating after some of the men I’d known or thought I could change or stayed with because they appeared to need me. I wasn’t after a grand love affair. At that time, I wanted stability: a man I liked, loved even, but not too much because that way, there was less chance of getting hurt. He’d rented out his flat in Kensington and moved in with me in what was supposed to be a temporary measure. We even talked about marriage, though neither of us wanted to rush into it. We discussed buying a place in the country. We planned a future.

The first years were good but an adjustment. Richard had his way of doing things, I had mine. Slowly, over the years, it became more his way of doing things, and I felt I’d begun to lose myself in wanting to live up to his high standards, rigid routines and expectations. Even sex was like a military operation: you put this bit here, then that there, twiddle a bit, oo, ah, then done and into the shower. Hardly passionate, and it soon faded to less and less frequent. I did wonder sometimes if Richard’s first wife had died from boredom.

The final straw was when he became controlling over money and too possessive of my time. I wanted a relationship but never to be joined at the hip. Richard resented me being away too long if I was abroad on shopping trips, and even suggested that I give up my work and let him support both of us. When I refused to do that, his already thin lips became pinched as he insisted that I use my money to pay off as much of my mortgage as I could every month. He would pay for everything else. I agreed to it because I could see that he was the kind of man who needed to see himself as the breadwinner, but that was the beginning of all the trouble. Richard earned plenty of money as a barrister but, as the months went by, I realized he was rather tight. He’d question if I really needed an item if I’d splashed out on a pair of shoes or expensive make-up. I felt I had to defend any extra purchases, so I took to hiding things in the back of the wardrobe then, when I wore something new, would say I’d had it for years. Lying like that never felt right. He made a budget for our household expenditure and went through it with a fine-tooth comb at the end of the month. He told me to fire Stuart because he could do my accounts for me instead. I refused and, when I confided in Stuart about the suggestion, he asked if I was truly happy with Richard. It was probably then that I began to really question if I was. Richard sulked if I wanted to go away with a friend and argued that I should be using the extra money to pay off the mortgage. He even tried to control what I ate, frowning if I chose to have a dessert, banning chocolate from the house.

I began to feel hemmed in, that I was losing my independence and my space. Richard didn’t want to do Christmas at Pete and Marcia’s. He wouldn’t wear the antlers’ horn headband they gave him; he couldn’t let go of maintaining the proper image. He never accepted any of my friends, and soon I was reluctant to have them round for fear of him criticizing them later. Although I thought Marcia had some whacky ideas, I didn’t like hearing Richard call her and Pete a couple of old hippies. He just didn’t get them, and was jealous of anyone who took my attention away from him. He even thought something was going on with Stuart, and watched him like a hawk if he ever dropped by the house. As if. I realized that what Richard really wanted was a stay-at-home wife who was there to cook his meals, keep his (my) house tidy and sweet-scented, plan his social diary, be there for him and him alone. I got bored with the predictability of our life – a G and T at seven, supper at seven thirty, a concert midweek, a theatre outing on Fridays, a proper roast lunch and walk on Sundays. The stability I had craved was suffocating me, and I began to feel like rebelling, not that I ever did. I toed the line and, with it, shrank inside from my true self.

When Richard sipped at his one, and only one, glass of fine wine with supper, I started to feel as if I’d like to polish off the whole bottle, then dance on the table. Anything to evoke a reaction. He disapproved of smokers, which made me want to go out and buy a pack of Marlboro and smoke the lot. He insisted on regular exercise and a long walk on Sundays, which made me want to slob about in my pj’s, watching trash TV, instead of one of his high-minded documentaries. I wanted to eat crisps and marshmallows instead of his only allowed TV snack, which was a bowl of olives from a deli in Kensington. And I was pretty sure his mother disapproved of me. She never thought I was good enough for her golden boy, though helping myself to the potpourri – thinking it was a bowl of crisps – when we first met, didn’t help improve her view of me. In the last year we were together, the cracks had begun to show in our relationship, and I was slipping down and through them. When Richard started telling me what to wear and advised me to cut up my credit card, I’d decided that was enough. I wanted my life back.

Was he the one I’d let go? Definitely not. He was a decent man, kind when he wanted to be, but we were done. Saranya Ji had said a true soulmate might bring challenges, but I’d breathed a sigh of relief when Richard had moved out and I never looked back.

*

After lunch, Ben, Freya and Ruby disappeared up to their rooms; others settled on sofas to snooze, others helped with the washing up.

‘Pete’s been online,’ said Marcia, as we cleared plates from the table and stacked them in the dishwasher.

‘What for?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

‘Billy and Grace.’

‘Ah. I thought he said it was going to be impossible to find them.’

‘True. It’s not easy but there’s so much information online now, we have made some headway.’

‘And how many people with those names have you found?’

‘Loads. You were right, Bea, both are common names, but I did find a whole family with the surname Harris who lived in Ireland then Manchester then in Cambridge. Pete’s going to get on to it in the New Year. When he has time, he’s going to do some more research for us. Is there anything else you can remember from what Saranya Ji told you that might be helpful?’

‘I told you everything.’

‘OK. Any places you’ve ever felt a feeling of déjà vu when you’ve visited them?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Maybe you should try and contact Saranya Ji, see if she had anything else to add?’

‘She was on tour in India, wasn’t she? She’s probably gone from Udaipur by now. How did you find her, Marcia? Was it online or did someone recommend her? Has she got a website?’

‘Not that I know of. It really was coincidence, as if meant to be. Someone at work told me about her ages ago and then, when we got to India, I saw a leaflet in one of the hotels advertising her tour in India.’

‘So how did you get in touch?’

‘I called the number on the leaflet and a man told me where she was going to and when and, amazingly enough, she was in Udaipur the very same dates that we were. Why? Do you want to contact her?’

‘No. I just wanted to know more about her, to see if there were any reviews about her.’

‘I don’t think I kept the leaflet but I’ll look. In the meantime, think back, Bea: is there anything else that you remember from your session; anything you didn’t tell us?’

‘I don’t think so. Second World War and … actually, I do remember something. She said Grace worked as a dressmaker in London.’

‘Bea, that makes all the difference. I seem to remember that the census records show occupations. It could narrow the search down significantly.’

I sighed. ‘OK, but say you did find one of them, or both of them, as I keep saying, so what? All it proves is that two people of that name existed, end of story.’

‘You don’t know that. You’d have made a crap detective, Bea. You look at clues, one leads to another. Anyway, I’m not giving up. So. London. Excellent. Second World War and Saranya Ji said that he went to war and didn’t return. If they were to be married, chances are they were quite young.’

‘Not necessarily. They may have met later in life.’

It was no use. Marcia was away. ‘The dates of the Second World War were 1939 to 1945. If I allow for them being engaged as young sweethearts, they could have been eighteen, nineteen or early twenties, and often young men of that age went away to war.’

‘Apparently some lads of only sixteen went to fight.’

‘Doubt if they’d have been engaged to be married at that age, though. And what was the maximum age for soldiers?’

‘I seem to remember it was forty, but older if called for Home Guard duty. I know because Richard was always watching documentaries about the war.’

‘But Saranya Ji said he went away to war, right? So he wouldn’t have been in the Home Guard.’

I nodded. ‘I think she said that. I didn’t make notes because it’s a load of baloney, Marcia.’

Marcia ignored me. ‘Hmm, but you’re right, Grace could have been in her thirties or forties.’

‘Unless he liked older women. He might have had a mother complex. She might have been ancient.’

‘I’ll get Pete to find out. I’ll ask him to look up the exact age men were no longer eligible to go to war so that we’re certain. He’ll probably already know but, by my reckoning, it gives us about twenty-five years as a time frame to look at. Men between sixteen and forty, women the same. If Grace was born around 1919, she’d have been around twenty when the war began. We can begin with that, and the fact that we’re looking in London also narrows the field. Other facts, her name and that she was a dressmaker will also help. I’m sure Pete will find her.’ Her face looked flushed with excitement. ‘Don’t you see, Bea, we’re making progress.’

I laughed. ‘Not we’re making progress: you’re on your own with this. I’m really not interested.’

‘Spoilsport. Where’s your sense of romance?’

‘As you know, that died a long time ago. Look, you go ahead, but don’t ask me to get involved.’

‘Too late,’ said Marcia, ‘you already are. Now, have you thought any more about your list of past lovers, though of course, we may be barking up the wrong tree looking back in time. It may well be that you are yet to meet this special man, so keep your options open, be on the lookout. In the meantime, though, how’s the list? Have you started it? So far, we have Andrew Murphy, and the recent ones like Richard and before him, Michael O’Connor, Joe Wilding and Graham, of course, plus the odd one I can remember from our earlier days. Pete might be able to track them down, no problem, but it would help if you put them in some kind of order according to dates.’

‘Are you suggesting that I look them all up?’

‘Yes.’

I rolled my eyes.

Luckily Pete came to the rescue. ‘Fill your glasses everyone,’ he called from the sitting room, ‘The Snowman is about to commence.’

‘Oh come on, Marcia, we can’t miss this. Tradition and all that, and they’re playing your song.’ I pulled her towards the sitting room where people were already gathering and we could hear the familiar strains of ‘We’re Walking in the Air’.

*

I got home around midnight to find that there was a package and card on the steps up to my front door. I took them inside and opened them.

‘Happy Christmas and sorry about the car, looks OK but if you see any damage, let me know. In the meantime, I got you a new one. Jon. XX’

I opened the parcel to find a box containing a toy Volkswagen Golf. Hah. Funny. Well, you know where you can stick that, I thought as I put the car in the waste-paper bin.